Singaporean student awarded second runner-up at computer programming competition TCS CodeVita 2024

• 25 finalist from 9 countries faced off at the grand finals
• Competition attracted over 444k registrations from 94 countries

Tata Consultancy Services announced the winners of its global coding contest CodeVita at a grand finale held at the TCS Olympus campus in Mumbai. Vannes Wijaya, a student from the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore, came in as the second runner-up at the competition that holds the Guinness World Record^TM as the world’s largest computer programming competition.

In its 11^th edition, the competition returned to its physical form after two years – the 9^th and 10^th editions were held virtually. TCS CodeVita attracted 444,000+ registrations from 94 countries, which it claims the highest ever, recording a 45% increase in the number of registrations from India this year, and a 26% increase in the number of registrations from other countries. 

The grand finale in Mumbai saw 25 finalists from 9 countries face off in the competition. While Andrighetti was awarded the winning prize of US$7,400 (SGD10,000), the runners-up Zhiwei Dai from People’s Republic of China and Vannes Wijaya from Singapore were awarded US$ 5,200 (SGD7,000) and US$2,200 (SGD3,000, respectively.

Of the 25 finalists, this season the competition saw nine finalists from India and 16 from across the globe, marking yet another milestone with the highest ever finalist count from outside of India, seven from Latin America (six from Chile, one from Peru), three from the People’s Republic of China, two from the USA and one each from Singapore, Taiwan, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. In a first, two female coders made it to the finalists this year. 

Four of the finalists are repeat finalists from the previous years. Apart from the contestants, the 11^th season of TCS CodeVita was also attended by dignitaries from Chile, Peru, Switzerland, Singapore, and Taiwan, as well as academicians and students from some of the top tech institutes of Mumbai.

Dr. Harrick Vin, chief technology officer, TCS, said, “Competitions like TCS CodeVita play a crucial role in nurturing technology talent pool by challenging their critical thinking and complex problem-solving skills, providing students with a platform to showcase their abilities, and push their limits. More than a decade of competitive programming has truly made our vision come true in many ways.” 

He added that CodeVita is more than a test of coding prowess; it is a celebration of ingenuity, collaboration, and creativity and the company is pleased to support and celebrate the young coding warriors as they embark on a journey of becoming architects of the future.

TCS CodeVita takes a gamified approach to spreading awareness about coding among students. Over the past few years, hundreds of students have completed internships at TCS, with the top three coders every season being offered an opportunity to intern directly with the TCS Research and Innovation team. CodeVita involves solving challenges over three rounds. After solving at least one challenge in Round One, a contestant faces a new set of complex questions and challenges in Round Two. 

Only the top 25 contestants were cleared to compete in the final round this year. Supporting the multiple code submissions across eight programming languages for TCS CodeVita is the Performance Engineering and Research Centre (PERC) arm of TCS Research.

Martin Andrighetti, winner, TCS CodeVita Season 11, said, “This journey started out as something to simply try out, and then as and when I started clearing the initial round, I became more serious. The entire experience of making the long journey to India and witnessing the culture and people here, together has been a very nice experience. To top it all, having friends from Chile and LATAM has made this experience even better. Platforms like CodeVita show us how far programming has come and how far it can take us in the future.”

While PERC created a specific framework that automates submission, compilation and evaluation of the designed code by contestants, the challenges themselves were curated by a community of experienced coders within TCS, called The Philacodist Club. An extensive range of questions from formula-based to algorithmic, including some with real-life applications to those relating to data structures were put together for contestants this year.